Pearson, Alien Cryptographies: The View from Queer (2008 reprint)

Pearson starts by describing gay and lesbian activist groups arguing for the importance of lesbian and gay characters on SF shows - as some proof/representation that indeed the future means both the existence of and acceptance of these identities. Pearson argues that it is this particular representation that is desired by SF viewers, 'the vision of a future in which queerness is neither hidden nor revealed as difference, but is simply there' (15). She wants to argue that gay characters might not 'queer' an SF text, but indeed, queering of such a text might require something altogether different. Specifically, she points to the notion that it would take a move beyond 'inclusion' to a more radical shift in the show to question current sex/gender systems and socio-cultural institutions.

I think it is this understanding of queer as questioning the foundations and discourses by which subjects are shaped in a society that also allows her to bring SF and queer together, seeing them both as having the ability to create different (and potentially radical) foundations. She suggests that SF and queer theory in some ways occupy similar theoretical space: 'Queer, with its denaturalization of master narratives and its movement towards subcultural and subaltern understandings of texts, operates, by analogy, on some of the same levels as sf' (18). She sees in SF the potential to write queer subjects, given the genre's resistance to realism, and the ensuing risk of being at the service of 'common sense.' Further, she describes a long history in SF (beginning with Shelley) of questioning foundational systems of thought. Taking her cue from Earl Jackson, Pearson argues that in SF, there is rejection of the Cartesian subject and instead insistence 'that the subject is the effect of the system' (18).

Pearson first reads Campbell's 'Who Goes There?' (1938) thinking through the cultural anxieties about the invisibility of the homosexual during the era of WWII. The need to reassert heterosexual values was accompanied by intense demonization in films and stories, SF genre included, of the Other. Particularly anxiety surrounded how to identify the alien, the queer, from the rest. Pearson thus claims that Campbell's story 'serves as a near perfect example of the way in which the story of the alien who passes as human derives from the precise confluence of anxieties that serve to claim, at the same time, that homosexuality is always written on the body and that it is always able to pass' (21).

Next, Pearson turns to thinking about what she calls the other half of the story. While Campbell's story is concerned with 'passing,' Pearson now wants to think about that which remains invisible and unrecognized, what she calls a 'queer text.' I think in this instance she is trying to differentiate between her queer reading of Campbell's story and the potential to recuperate and recognize texts as queer. To think through this idea she turns to Reamy's 'Under the Hollywood Sign' (1975), a story which she believes can undergo a queer re-reading, clarified as not just being concerned with the text, but also 'of the heteronormative reading protocols that have constrained earlier readings' (28). She argues that this story is an unfaithful reproduction of the 'trope of the invisible alien' (28). Particularly, the story, in Pearson's reading, is concerned with the visibile invisibility - the fact that the aliens in the story are only visible to the narrator. Pearson argues that the story is concerned with three related issues: the question of visibility, the sexual identity of the narrator, and the identity of the aliens (29). However, the shifting and coded nature of these themes, argues Pearson, has meant that can be read as not being queer enough. Pearson argues that the story intervenes into the invisibility trope as expressed in Campbell's story in part because of this ambiguity, particularly with reference to the aliens' identities. Pearson explains, 'they fail to serve as warnings of the invisible "passing" Other.' The same can be said for the ambiguity around the narrator's sexuality through expressing a universal homosexual desire in the story and further suggesting that this alone does and cannot account for the narrator's desire.

Thus, Pearson reads Reamy's text as 'becoming queer,' once accessible only through hidden information, cryptography, but now containing markers that the 'modern subject' cannot avoid. She suggests that this incurs a shift from cryptography to cartography. Pearson argues for the queerness of the subject/text as 'an effect of a system that can be variously understood, depending on one's worldview' (33). This comes back to her earlier assertion that SF was a ripe arena for queer re-readings precisely because of its focus on the system over the individual. Being concerned with systems, the SF genre brings to the fore the importance of the system in the production of subjectivity. Thus, she concludes that the story's queer quality is less about the character being gay, and more 'in the way the text itself calls into question the very system which effects the narrator as a gay subject' (33).